Authors: Jane Smiley
“That’s what I thought,” I said. I looked at each of them and each of them looked at me. All three of us nodded slightly. We were agreed, then.
We had gotten the permit for the golf course, and we were very close to getting the permit for the clubhouse and the waste-treatment facility (pending ironing out some provisions about community access to it after a certain date, or in case certain things did or did not happen—there was a definite feeling that everything had to fall into place in order for anything to fall into place). Most days I put one foot in front of the other and left the larger issues for Marcus and Jane. The farm still looked the same, though, as when the Thorpes had lived there. But it was the wrong time of year to begin contouring the golf course. Marcus had told me that once they came in I would be surprised how quickly it went. I told him I had seen that over and over; it seems like you’re not getting anywhere and then, all of a sudden, there you are. As we drove through the gate and under the overhanging trees, the Davids were quiet, staring out the windows. In midsummer, it was like driving back to the thirties or the twenties, down the green-gold hillside to the creek. The bright flat sky beyond looked eternal. Simultaneously, they opened the windows of the car, and I turned off the air-conditioning. I halted beside the front entry. A grassy fragrance passed through, and the rat terrier stood up, stuck her nose out of the window, and sniffed. Then she jumped out the window onto the driveway.
We wandered around the grounds. We hadn’t planted any annuals, but the perennials were taken care of by the gardener and his assistant, who were still living on the property, keeping an eye on it. Nothing delicate or springlike, everything happy in the heat, hardy in the breeze. We walked down the slope a ways and looked back at the house, then came up and stood on the porch and looked down the slope. David John said, “I think it’s more than we can take on as a weekend job.” We all laughed.
“We’re looking for investors. This is going to be the clubhouse; the golf course runs along there. And then we’re going to put up fancy houses.”
“Whatever happened to buy low, sell high?”
“Come inside.”
We wandered through the house without saying anything. The rooms were entirely empty now: hall, library, two sitting rooms, sunroom, formal living room, dining room, kitchen. Up the carved walnut staircase. At the landing, you could turn either way below the bank of windows that looked out on the formal garden; then there were six bedrooms, two of which were suites; and then, above that, storage, servants’ rooms, two more bathrooms. Much woodwork, many windows, many doors. “It’s going to cost a mint to furnish this place,” said David John. “I don’t think a few throw rugs here and there are going to do it, honey.”
“That’s why we need investors.”
“You know,” said David Pollock, “we have a friend of a friend who’s got the furniture. You know Martin, with the costumes?”
“Thank you for that tip.”
“He knows James, with the furniture.”
“He knows,” said David John, “Yves, with the money.”
“Yes, he does,” said David Pollock. “We’ve only met Yves once, but he’s a designer. He’s so hot right now. People bow to him. I’m sure he’s looking for a sinkhole, a very beautiful sinkhole, just like this one, to throw his extra money down.”
We wandered around for another couple of hours, looking, chatting, naming names. I kept a list. I thought Marcus and Jane would be pleased. When we were driving back to the hardware store in Deacon, I said, “So, what should I do about Felicity?”
“She’s not going to leave him,” said David John again.
“Her real problem is that she doesn’t have a vocation. Or even a job,” said David Pollock. “I think she’s stuck here. Her only salvation is to travel back in time and do it all over differently.”
The three of us nodded together.
On Monday, I gave Jane the list of names. She looked it over, and then I said, “Do tell me, Jane, what the point of these real estate investment trusts is.”
“Well, I think the real point is cash flow.”
“Yes, but, pardon me for asking, what do the investors get for their money?”
“I’m sure, in the end, some of them hope to profit.”
“In the end?”
“Well, think of it as a sort of junk bond. High risk, big payoff. Most people who have plenty of money to invest understand that. Believe me, we are not going after little old ladies on widows’ pensions. That’s a game for the S and Ls.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, you know, bundling passbook savings accounts and selling them to other institutions that are paying a quarter of a point higher interest. Or less than that. I’m sure that’s what Crosbie is doing. That merger hasn’t gone through yet, but they’re rolling in dough. Not just investments, either, but a flood of deposits. I guess they raised payouts by a quarter of a point or something, and some deposit brokers started sending them more deposits than they can have on the books and still look good. Crosbie came to Marcus just the other day and asked if we have any other properties anywhere.” She shrugged. “And what else did he say? Something about how Portsmouth Savings was thinking of getting into T-bill futures or even junk bonds. It’s a new world, that’s for sure.”
“I’m not sure Bart is ready for the new world, Jane.”
“Who
is
? I’ve been doing finance and investment for fifteen years, and I’m not ready for other people’s junk bonds. Most junk bonds are pure roulette, is what I told Marcus. There’s no way to judge their value except by some kind of intuition. Marcus says they have no real value, only market value, and I understand that in principle, but I don’t know. I suppose I’m lucky to find myself here in this little office in a little town with a tangible asset on my hands.”
“It’s a good asset.”
“I know you think that, Joe, and when I wake up in the night, I remember that you think that and I can actually get back to sleep.”
I stared at her.
“Anyway, Bart doesn’t have to deal with that end of the business. As long as they keep doing a few residential mortgages, he’ll have something to do. But listen. These trust people aren’t like buyers. You know, I know a woman who went into the horse business. She bought two miniature horses. You know what they look like? About the size of Great Danes, or even golden retrievers, if you’re lucky. Anyway, they graze out on her lawn, and she deducts everything—part of her mortgage payment, her lawn maintenance costs, her house maintenance costs. I mean, she’s in the horse business. She doesn’t have to make a profit for seven years. By that time she will have saved a small fortune in taxes.”
“I hope we make a profit before seven years is out.”
“Me, too, but these guys”—she gestured at the list of investors—“they don’t care one way or the other. They have to have losses too. So we can do that for them. Profit and loss; both are services in the end.” She smiled.
She seemed in a good mood, so I hazarded a question. “Did you know Marcus was leaving the IRS, or was it sudden?”
“Oh, God, Marcus complained about working there so much, it was me who told him he had to get out. It took him a year to make up his mind. Between you and me, I don’t think he ever would have left if he thought he could get promoted, but after the election, he bet me that there would be cutbacks, and sure enough there were, and that was it for him.” She grinned. “Marcus is always ready to sell himself to the highest bidder, even if the bid isn’t very high.”
“You have a very jaded view, Jane.”
“Yes. I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich?”
We laughed.
A couple of days later, I ran into Bart. He was coming out of a travel agency right next to the drugstore I was going into. He waved his tickets in my face and said, “Whatcha doing?”
“Buying some Pepto-Bismol for my mother. What are
you
doing?”
“Going to France. Everyone. The whole family. Two weeks. We leave tomorrow, and we’re flying first class. It was Crosbie’s suggestion. I mean, he said, you know, time to give the place a little style. No more bow ties.”
“Are you taking my money with you?”
Bart laughed. “You won’t believe this, but no. Crosbie gave me a little bonus. Well, not only me. All the vice presidents. We had some investments that paid off.”
“What were they?”
“Let’s see. Oh, yeah. T-bill futures. See you in a couple of weeks!” He jumped in his car and drove off.
CHAPTER
21
S
OMETIME IN MID-SEPTEMBER,
Marcus and I were driving out to the farm to have a look at the progress of the golf course. It was a blank sort of day—hot but hazy, humid. I had the air-conditioning on high, but it wasn’t making much of a difference in my mood. I had a Rolling Stones tape in the tape deck. Marcus hadn’t said much since we got in the car, but I was used to his moods by now and didn’t pay any attention. The scenery looked tired and uninteresting, the dusty end of summer. I passed the intersection of Felicity’s road and thought of her, and Marcus said, “You need a date.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“I was in your office the other day looking for a copy of the site plan, and I think you’re aging prematurely.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, it looks like you dust, for one thing.”
“I do dust.”
“And everything has a place and everything is in its place.”
“This is true. I’m a well-brought-up boy.”
“I moved a few things out of their places.”
“I thought something funny—”
“And when I let myself in this morning, you had moved them all back and straightened things up a little bit.”
I stared at him.
He said, “That’s very codgerlike behavior.”
“I’ve always been that way. I’m supposed to justify being a little meticulous because you went into my office on the sly?”
“You need kids.”
“I’ve never needed kids.”
“You’re spiraling inward. I told Linda about this test I gave you, and she said, ‘He’s spiraling inward.’”
“I am not spiraling inward.”
He ignored me. He continued, “Come to dinner Saturday night. Linda has a friend for you to meet.”
“I don’t want to meet any friends. I don’t want to come to dinner.”
“She’s making a standing rib roast with roast potatoes and a chocolate cake.”
“I’ll come for the food.” But not really. Really, I was coming because I had never been invited before and I wanted to see what their family was like. Others had been invited. Until that very moment, I hadn’t even realized I was jealous of them.
He said, “Think about it. What kind of life do you have? No girlfriend or wife, no kids, no hobbies.” He shook his head.
I said, “My hobby is making a billion dollars. After I have it, my hobby will be spending it.” A few moments later, I said, a bit defensively, “I like to travel. Sherry and I went to someplace exotic every year.”
We drove on. We were almost to the farm when he said, “Do you think Jane is interested in you?”
“No. Why?”
“Because I think she’s interested in someone, but I can’t figure out who.”
“Well, what difference does it make?”
“She’s my sister.”
The coincidence was that about halfway through the dinner Linda cooked for us a few nights later, I realized that the woman I was there to meet was the same woman Betty and Felicity had discussed introducing me to on some previous occasion that I couldn’t quite remember—I could only remember the feeling I had had that Felicity had been courting me and teasing me in that unique way she had, and as soon as I realized that this was that woman, she began to look better to me—she got to be infused with Felicity’s playfulness and subterfuge. I won’t say that I got interested, but I did get looser, and I began to think of things to say.
Susan Webster was blond and pretty. She had made the appetizers, which were a selection of tapas that we ate with the wine she brought. She talked nicely about her life in Spain, in Granada, where the Alhambra was. She painted tiles and wrote occasional articles for local newspapers. She was thinking of going back to school, maybe art school. What she really liked to do was decorate bathrooms to be very bright and cheerful, with Mexican and Spanish tiles. Marcus assured her that you could, indeed, have a whole bathroom designing business, if you were creative enough. Linda said she wished she were creative. The ten-year-old, Amanda, offered comments from time to time. At one point, she said that if she were allowed, she would paint her room completely black—floors, walls, and ceiling, and then put those kind of stars all over it that lit up when you turned on one of those purple lights, and then you could lie on the bed and feel like you were out in space and there was no such thing as up or down. This seemed quite charming to me, until I saw her glare at her mother after this comment, as if this were a realistic plan that her mother had unreasonably balked. Justin, who seemed more than just a year younger, occupied himself with eating the food on his plate in some kind of pattern or sequence that was more complicated than I could figure out by simply observing him. It was disconcerting. But he was polite and cleaned his plate and I thought that my mother would have been happy to have him as her grandson.
The house looked good, but I wouldn’t have brought Gottfried around. The Burnses’ taste was excellent, and the furniture was expensive but not quite right for the house. The house was American, their taste was European—a little too deluxe. Susan Webster kept oohing and aahing at what they had done, and the
touches
they had added, and Linda nodded and smiled, more as if she were relieved than pleased. The children adjourned to the TV room, and we went into the living room. I wondered if they expected the fix-up to take immediately, or if I had some time to make up my mind.
Marcus called me the next day. He said, “She’s a good choice for you. She’s well traveled and sophisticated without being hard or intimidating. She’s petite. Petite is good, I mean generally good. There are specific petite women you wouldn’t want to get involved with and specific tall women that you would, but in general petite is a better category than tall.”
“What am I looking for, Marcus?”
“A wife.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because if it’s been too long since your divorce, people start wondering about you.”
“Why?”
“Because men are better off married. Single men die much sooner than married men, and you don’t want to look like you’re queer.”
“I don’t, that’s true.”
“Investors don’t like it.”
“Some do.” I was thinking of the Davids. He ignored me.
“Didn’t you like her?”
“I could hardly tell. It was too much like our parents were arranging an engagement and we were on our best behavior. Frankly, I like to meet women in bars and assess them primarily on their ability to throw off their inhibitions with grace.” I thought of Felicity. “Especially bars at the shore.”
“So take her to a bar at the shore and try her out. But remember, she’s auditioning for wife, not girlfriend. This is a public relationship, not a private one.”
“Excuse me?”
“I wish I were in your position. You know, most guys get married in their twenties, before they really know what their careers are going to look like, and most of the time they pick someone they’re comfortable with, which means someone from the neighborhood or from college—always someone from the place where they happen to have been
most
comfortable. But if they have any ambition, their lives change and that person may not want, or be able, to go along with those changes. I just think I’m lucky. Linda and I are so much alike we can more or less do it together. But I’m telling you, if you look at the first wives of most self-made men, you have to say, ‘
that’s
a picture of who he once thought he was.’ But you—through no fault of your own you can now design your marriage to fit your future.”
“I hardly know this woman. What if I don’t happen to fall in love with her?”
“Every successful businessman is married. If his wife can’t stand him and lives a long-suffering existence, that’s all to the good, because it gives him something to bond with his golf buddies about, and it shows that even though he isn’t very nice to her, he’s got something she’s willing to stick around for, at least until he leaves her for someone younger and more beautiful.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“Whereas if the younger woman subsequently treats him badly, he doesn’t lose any points. I mean, he
gains
points if the younger woman caters to him and makes a big deal of him, but if she’s a bitch he’s still even. And he might even
lose
points if he sticks with the first wife, depending on whether the guys he associates with have stuck with theirs.”
“How did you figure—”
“Big money is like the army or the priesthood or the Senate. It’s about being a guy among guys. You have to be very careful of the appearance you project, or you don’t look right as a guy.”
“Why do I always end one of these conversations with you with the feeling that I should stick with what I know?”
He ignored this. “You can’t tell this, but my instinct is, she’s right for you.” He hung up. Hadn’t Betty said something like that when she spoke to me about her?
I spent that day, Sunday, cleaning my condo and thinking about Susan Webster. It was certainly possible to conjure up a fantasy about her. She had a nice neck and a nice smile. She wore sexy shoes. She had a soft voice. She was young. And it was certainly possible to look around my abode and watch what I was doing and wonder what my fate would be if someone like Marcus didn’t intervene. Here was my list of jobs for the day:
Wash windows inside and out
Wash windowsills
Pull out refrigerator, mop floor, change refrigerator filter
Change furnace filters
Vacuum hot air registers
Clean carpets
Was that a guy’s sort of list, apart from the furnace filters? It occurred to me that my guyness might rise if I just hired a cleaning lady, but as soon as I thought of that, I thought instantly that she might not do the sort of meticulous job I would do myself. Then I wondered if that was a tycoonish sort of thought (no, of course not) and what a tycoon would do about that, and then I thought, Well, he would probably yell at someone. And say I did marry Susan Webster and she did move into my place, or we found a place together. She painted tiles and wrote, and possibly she wasn’t very good at cleaning up after herself, so that would be a whole new can of worms I would have to deal with. I imagined myself down on my hands and knees, a rag in my hand and some turpentine beside me, cleaning up stray dots and dabs of Susan Webster’s paints. It was a great antidote to romance, in spite of the sexy shoes.
So I went outside and washed the car inside and out, including removing and vacuuming the floor mats and under the seats, and wiping down the plush upholstery with upholstery cleaner; then I soaped the car with detergent and polished it with carnauba wax and it looked great, and no one would accuse a guy who washed his car of being anything other than a guy. But when I came inside, as I was going to the bathroom to take a shower, I noticed that the tops of the drapes were dusty, and the whole time I was taking my shower and washing my hair and half thinking about where I was going to go that evening—out to eat? to a movie? down to the Viceroy?—that dust niggled in my mind and I just could not help myself; when I was dressed and ready to go out, I got out the vacuum cleaner and put the long wand on it and vacuumed the tops of the drapes, and then I put the vacuum cleaner away, everything having a place and everything being in its place, and after I got into the car I thought about my father, who had taught me these sorts of habits and led me to think, possibly incorrectly, that these were the ways of men, but my father was, if anything, the opposite of a tycoon or an executive, or even a self-made man in the American sense. My father’s idea of an important thing to do was to preach submission to the will of God at Sunday service.
By the time I had gone out to dinner and to the movies and come home again and parked my car away from the trees so nothing would drop on it in the night, and in general by the time I had observed myself being careful and persnickety, as my mother would have said, I thought maybe Marcus was right, I needed to find someone. It had been too long since Felicity. I could spend the next however many years lamenting and marveling at the fact that she was married to Hank, or I could get on with it.
The next day when I was at the office, I said, “So, Jane, how did you and your former husband meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She smiled. “I’ll tell you the truth, if you don’t tell Marcus.”
“What?”
“We met in a hot tub in California. We were both naked.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. The first words he ever said to me were”—she mimed drawing in her breath and pinching a joint between her thumb and forefinger—“‘want a hit?’” She laughed merrily. “And the first words I ever said to him were, ‘Is it good shit?’ I’d like to say it was all bravado, but it wasn’t. I smoked a lot of dope in those days.”
“Which days?”
“Late sixties. Some of my girlfriends were in school in Lawrence, so I would go over there from KC every weekend and hang out with them. One August, we drove out to San Francisco and stayed with some friends of theirs for a week. We went down to Big Sur. That’s where I met Howie.”
“Marcus always makes him out to be Mr. Corporate America.”
“Well, he got to be that way. His father was an executive at Boeing. In the end that’s what he felt comfortable with. Here I was, this naked chick with long hair and a way with a joint, who had a job at a bank. He loved that combination.”
“Why did you get married?”
“Why not? Doesn’t everyone?”
“That’s what my wife thought. I’m not sure anymore, because we didn’t have kids and were never going to have kids.” Remembering what Marcus had told me about Jane’s divorce, I glanced at her. She was still smiling. “She was—is—a little high-strung.”
Jane laughed. “And now you’re wondering if I was a little high-strung too.”
“I wasn’t, but I
could
wonder that.”
“Not at all. But guess who took care of darling Marcus and darling Katie and darling Mary Rose when they were infants? I knew how to change a diaper when I was six. So did my mother. I’m sure
her
mother did, too. I thought it was a tradition that needed to end in my generation. Marcus is the only one of us with kids. The girls all ran screaming in the other direction. But the others are young yet.”